I've been writing this month. 50,000 words is actually pretty easy for me provided I have an hour to rub together every day. Over the, what, six or seven years I've participated in National Novel Writing Month I've gotten pretty good at just ignoring quality and vomiting words onto the page. I've even gotten to the point where some of those words are genuinely pretty good! And this year I did something kinda unique for myself; I pantsed the whole thing.
That's right. November 1st I had one single concept. A group of people are stuck in a room, and they open a door to a room full of bees. That was literally all I had to go on, and around that I've built a three-character thriller/mystery that crosses paths with video games and is, as of the time of this writing, over 48,238 words long. So that's another NaNoWriMo gone pretty well for me. Now the inevitable question.
Dawg, if you've drafted so many novels, why haven't you edited and published any of them?
Uh... well... dunno. I'm lazy? Several of those novels have great characters, interesting worlds, or both, to the extent that I do keep revisiting them and thinking "I really oughta edit and publish this thing." But I haven't done that. Other projects have taken my time, projects that take less time and have more immediate payoff. Stuff like comic books, games, or heck even albums of music.
Speaking of which, I have a Christmas EP coming out soon.
And I've enjoyed all of those other projects, and I like doing them and I'm proud of them, so it's not like I want to stop doing those. But I also don't want to stop writing longer pieces of fiction like these novels. So what's the take-away here? Well, I think mainly that NaNoWriMo isn't working for me anymore. Like, it was an important tool to help conivince me that I could finish a longer project, like a novel. And that's good, no doubt. But now it's just resulting in me drafting stuff I don't care about and aiming for wordcounts just to get a little badge on a profile. So while I may very well still focus on writing during future Novembers, I don't think I'll be focusing on writing new novels.
That's it. That's what I came here to say. Uh... you can go now.
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